A Tale of Two Kind of Boring Cities

travelchina \ 2009-07-02

Our first city is Bao An, located in the middle of nowhere. According to Mr. Yin, the only way to find it on a satellite map is if you knew where it was already and then looked for a giant lake thing…and then you’d be close. Bao An is a farmer’s town. It is surrounded by farms…which never seem to have anyone in them, and dirt and dense rainforest like jungles. The city itself is in the process of a rebirth or it could very well be being born for the first time. A lot of it is construction and the outskirts are littered with various mounds of rubbish.

The rubbish is mostly filled with firecracker husks. Chinese firecrackers, as you may know, are strings of hundreds of deafening little pellets that people in Bao An like to set off with an almost hourly regularity. This begs the question, what have Yucen and I been doing? Nothing really. We wake up, eat, take a morning nap, eat, hang out in the room with airconditioning (It’s a good 90 in the rest of the house when it’s not raining and when it rains it’s humid something awful), and then eat again. I personally have slowly but surely been going through Aladdin in Chinese (which means playing gameboy…). We recently have moved to Huang Shi, a city much like Eden Prairie. We were privy to the social wanderings of one of Yucen’s cousins. We went on a boat ride, sang Karaoke for 3 hours and ate at a crab restaurant. Restaurants are Hubei’s specialty because that’s really the only thing to do here. I’ve eaten wild-caught mini-lobsters, crabs, eggplant tempura, various fishes, PANCAKES, and…

BACON — REAL BACON

Honestly, that bacon was a shot from the dark. Delicous maple bacon in the middle of nowhere. Also…the pancakes, I think it’s Hubei’s equivalent of watermelon for dessert. For the adults here, there’s been lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of alcohol. It’s almost as if everyone is making up for lost years of drinking by cramming as many toasts as they can into one meal. One man in particular today had almost a bottle of maitai and wine to himself….. Also, today I was referred to as the “American Uncle with a long nose and big eyebrows,” when (assumedly) she thought I couldn’t understand…but this was at a restaurant that had ALLIGATOR TAIL(S?) on ice just chillin’ in the lobby.

Concerning Pictures

Unfortuantely, at least where we are right now, uploading pictures to the blog directly is really slow…so I put some pictures on Flickr which seems to be a little faster (not by much though…).